Recently, margin trades, that is the handling of loans, funds or foreign exchange and the like on behalf of financial organizations or individual investors, has become popular in the financial products market. Distinct from other exchange trading where funds for the full amount of the trade is required up front, margin trades are executed with only a fraction of the full value placed on deposit; that is, the trade is said to be executed on margin.
In such margin trades, the margin trading company receives an order from the customer and executes the trade. In response to the order received from the customer, at this time, the margin trading company sends a covering order to a bank that covers transactions (hereinafter, transaction-covering bank).
The purpose of this covering order is to maintain the net position of the margin trading company so as to be flat. For example, when the margin trading company receives an order from the customer to purchase $1M and to sell $0.9M, the net position of the company is $0.1M ($1M-$0.9M)(i.e., a $0.1M buying position from the customer and a $0.1M selling position from the margin trading company) and the margin trading company also bears the risk of fluctuations in currency exchange values.
In order to cancel or reduce this risk, the margin trading company can make their position to be approximately flat by sending a covering order to buy a certain rate amount (here for simplicity $0.1M).
A system structure to realize such margin trading is shown in FIG. 8. In FIG. 8, the system 1000 for margin trading is connected to a transaction-covering bank terminal 1010 and a user terminal 1020.
The system 1000 for margin trading receives ‘selling order’ or ‘buying order’ from the user terminal 1020. A lower application layer 1003 of the system 1000 for margin trading receives the selling or buying orders. The lower application layer 1003 is composed of a plurality of lower application layer components (dedicated information processing terminals) and each lower application component notifies the business logic 1002 of the received order information.
The business logic 1002 is composed of a plurality of business logic application components (dedicated information processing terminals) and synchronizes between components as to the order information, notification of which came from a corresponding lower application component. Here, this synchronization between components is realized by writing to a common database each time a given component receives an order. That is, order information received by all components is managed in an integrated fashion in this database. By this operation, the position in system 1000 for margin trading can be determined. For instance, in the above example, the position can be determined to be “selling position of $0.1M.”
After synchronizing the order information, the business logic 1002 sends the covering order to the terminal 1010 of the transaction-covering bank to make the position flat in response to the position information. If the current position is “selling position of $0.1M”, then “buying order of $0.1M” is sent.
As described above, in the existing system 1000 for margin trading, by summing up the orders from a plurality of user terminals 1020, the covering order is conducted to make the net position to be flat.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-189982 discloses a margin trading system.